Mike Huckabee calls Muslims 'uncorked animals'

Former Arkansas governor and current Fox News host Mike Huckabee raised eyebrows and ire after he called Muslims 'uncorked animals' on his radio show earlier this week.

Reacting to the recent US government decision to temporarily shut down 21 embassies due to an alleged imminent al-Qaeda terrorist threat as the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan neared, Huckabee said:

"I know we're not supposed to say anything unkind about Islam. I mean, it's politically incorrect. I get that. But can someone please explain to me why it is that we tiptoe around a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called 'holiest days.' You know, if you've kept up with the Middle East, you know that the most likely time to have an uprising of rock-throwing and rioting comes on the day of prayer on Friday. So the Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals-- throwing rocks and burning cars. You know, I'm just pointing out that all for all of the demands that we're supposed to be so very polite, and I'm not saying all Muslims are radical and I'm not saying that all Muslims are violent. I'm not. But we as a government recognize that the most likely times for them to erupt in some type of terrorist activity, violent storming of an embassy, is on their holy days."

Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential candidate who won the Iowa caucuses, then contrasted the allegedly 'animalistic' behavior of Muslims after Ramadan to that of Christians:

"Now my point is, do you ever say, 'Oh boy, it's Christmas, Oh my gosh, these Christians are going to come out of that Christmas Eve service and they are going to Walmart, and they are going to so rip that place apart, because you know what happens when they go in there and pray about Jesus. And they get out of there, and they go straight to the mall, and they just, I mean, they set fire to the place'... I don't really recall that the government has to issue a warning and say, 'Look out! It's Easter! Those Christians are coming. They'll be throwing eggs all over town.' That's just not what we do."

"I know I'm likely to just get hammered for what I've just said," Huckabee then acknowledged.

And he was.

In a column on the very same conservative Daily Caller site, Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA spokesman Qasim Rashid wrote that "the Qur'an specifically commands Muslims to forget all worldly matters and focus solely on prayer-- and certainly not on violence-- on its holy days." Rashid decries Huckabee for "dehumanizing Muslims" by "comparing them to animals" before dropping this bomb:

"I'm shocked at Huckabee's double standard that argues because violence occurs in a Muslim majority nation, it is Islam's fault. What would Huckabee think of a nation in which a person is murdered every 17 minutes? A nation with cities that have higher murder rates than war-torn Iraq? Or a nation in which a rape occurs every six minutes? A nation in which one in four women will be raped before graduating college and 97 percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail? A nation in which a violent crime occurs every 26.2 seconds and a property crime occurs every 3.5 seconds? A nation that comprises five percent of the world's population but a world-leading 25 percent of the world's prison population? This isn't Syria or Saudi Arabia, it's a nation in which more than 70 percent of its citizens identify as Christian. This is the United States of America."

This isn't the first time Huckabee has offended Muslims by making controversial or untrue statements about the religion. In 2011, he criticized Christian churches for allowing Muslims to worship in them while a local mosque was under construction and compared Islam to pornography. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, falsely railed that Muslims "believe Jesus Christ and all the people who follow him are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated."

In fact, Muslims believe Jesus is one of the greatest of all the 'prophets.'